We’ve almost reached the end of 2017! You’ve probably spent this past month scrambling to finish out 2017 strong and wrap up your 2018 plans. To save you some time, we’ve assembled our most important blog posts from 2017 specifically for demand gen marketers. With this knowledge under your belt, in just 30 minutes you’ll be prepared to hit the ground running with your personalization strategy in 2018.

Let’s start off this list with the obvious question: why personalize? Is it even important for demand gen marketers to invest in personalization? The short answer is “yes,” but guest blogger Katie Martell makes a stronger argument in her compelling guest post. She shares her reasons why B2B marketers need to deliver relevant experiences to each prospect in a world where breaking through the noise is becoming increasingly more difficult.

So you and your team understand the value of personalization and are looking to get started in 2018. After you’ve invested in personalization technology, you need to determine how to begin. But your team likely has so many ideas — how do you focus your efforts to maximize the impact? While there is no right way to get started, we can provide some guidelines to planning and executing your personalization strategy — which we’ve done in this blog post.

Have you ever heard a buzzword so many times that its actual meaning becomes diluted? “Machine learning” is headed in that direction for many marketers. But it doesn’t need to be that way. A great personalization platform will make it easy for you to test and customize your own machine-learning strategy in a straightforward way. In this post, we demystify the elements of machine-learning personalization using a demand gen example.

Machine-learning algorithms aren’t just for e-commerce companies. Demand gen marketers can use machine learning to display the most relevant website content to each visitor to match their interests and intent. Not sure what that looks like for your organization? Check out a few examples in this post by our very own “Evergage on Evergage” power user, Zach Skole.

Have you ever looked into the numbers to uncover how many of your conversions come from first-time visitors? We did at Evergage, and we were shocked to discover that nearly 80% of our conversions are from first-time visitors! In this post, our CMO, Andy Zimmerman, outlines the importance of being relevant to all visitors — especially on their first visits — to avoid missing conversion opportunities.

As marketers, it’s easy to get caught up in what you can add to your site to make it more personalized for each visitor. But don’t forget that sometimes a personalized experience can be created by removing content instead. Some messages on your site just aren’t relevant to everyone. Going into 2018, try thinking about situations on your site where a message is irrelevant to a visitor or segment — and read this post for inspiration.

You might be viewing your marketing automation platform and personalization platform as separate pieces of technology, but they can be used together to develop more complete profiles for contacts, deliver more relevant emails, personalize web experiences even for anonymous visitors, and more. Find out why bringing these two critical pieces of demand gen technology together in 2018 is critical to the execution of your strategy.

Looking for some expert advice to kickstart your ABM initiatives? Look no further than Joe Chernov, CMO of InsightSquared and ABM expert. We asked him questions like “What advice can you offer to marketers struggling to get sales to support ABM campaigns?” “How should marketers think about measuring ABM today, and what’s necessary to report to the board or leadership team?” and more in this blog post.

If you’re looking to develop your own ABM strategy, you’ll want to make sure you have a solid framework in place and take a logical approach. Our own ABM Specialist, Catherine Kervick, has identified five areas to focus on (which she has dubbed “the 5 P’s”). Learn from an ABM expert who has been where you are in this two-part blog post.

No ABM framework is complete without personalization. Website personalization helps marketers grab the attention of target prospects, engage them with relevant content, and convert them to leads and customers. But according to SiriusDecisions, there are three different types of ABM strategies. In this post, we provide ideas for personalization campaigns for each of these three types of strategies.

Final Thoughts

And if you’re looking for even more content to peruse while you’re finishing up 2017, check out our new book,One-to-One Personalization in the Age of Machine Learning. It can help you wrap your head around the past, present and future of personalization and get you ready to head into next year. Download the full version for free on our site.